Basheera Khan writes about social media, cool new software and all things geek. In addition to blogging for the Telegraph, she is an occasional contributor to TechCrunch Europe and a freelance user experience consultant. Bash is a South African living in London. Yes, another one. More about Basheera.

Twitter is dead. Long live Foursquare! (Oh, and Google Wave too)

Yes, Twitter went down. Again. People couldn't see any recent tweets other than their own (what was that about the social media echo chamber er er?). Updates from friends were frozen and follower and friend counts momentarily reset to zero. ZERO. I forgot what panic was until I saw this:

Last time this happened, we all flocked to Friendfeed to give vent to our angst at losing the teat – er, I mean – Tweetstream. Now it appears there are two contenders battling it out for the acknowledged 'mutual consolation space' when Twitter fails.

As it happens, they both launched to much fanfare this week – the greatly-anticipated Google Wave and the social media game Foursquare, played largely across location-aware mobile phones.

Spending an afternoon with a foot in either camp, I can safely say that while Google Wave was a good enough place for the deskbound to catch up with each other, Foursquare's Twitter integration, allowing you another channel to share stuff with your Twitter friends, and its ease of use on the go proved itself as a Twitter fail-safe at the very least.

But the game is so much more than just another place to tweet. It's an ingenious concept designed to encourage city-dwellers out of their comfort zones, getting them to discover new places where they take on challenges set by their friends. So instead of a reassuring but uninspiring review ("Yeah, I've eaten there. It's alright."), you can suggest something like: "Go to Bea's of Bloomsbury. Try the afternoon tea and say hi to Bea." Different activities earn you points, while special achievements unlock badges and trophies.

If you're fascinated by people watching, Foursquare and its ilk add an intriguing new component to that practise. SocialGreat combines data from Foursquare, Brightkite and graffitiGeo to map the crowds in major cities in very near real-time.

Of course, having yet another social network to sign up to brings the familiar conundrum – how do you decide who to 'friend' when the game hinges upon you sharing your physical location with people? One gamer (and, I should add, a friend IRL) made the real-world correlation fairly swiftly: